The Lebanese are making it clear that they do not want Hamas — or any other Palestinian group — to drag them into another war with Israel.

Posted on December 24, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
Lebanon: Do Not Let the Palestinians Destroy Our Country
by Khaled Abu Toameh
December 29, 2021

It appears that the Palestinians are determined to continue their fight against Israel until the last Arab. For decades, the Palestinians have used Israel’s neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Lebanon, as launching pads for various types of attacks against Israel. In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s several Palestinian groups, including Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), set up military training bases in Jordan and Lebanon to launch attacks on Israel. The Jordanians and Lebanese ended up paying a heavy price for hosting these groups and allowing them to use their territory to plan and carry out attacks against Israel. READ MORE

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Dermer: “Without a U.S. credible military threat, no diplomacy will achieve a positive outcome a positive outcome”

Posted on December 24, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Iran nuclear deal has ‘put us on cruise control heading over a cliff,’ former envoy says
by Dmitriy Shapiro
December 24, 2021

Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer this week defended his government’s positions that encouraged America to leave the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and supported Israel’s current position that the U.S. must leave a military option on the table and signal that Iran cannot develop nuclear weapons…The former envoy said he stands by his previously expressed stance that U.S. withdrawal from the deal (also known as the JCPOA) under the Trump administration was the single-most important decision that any president had made for Israel’s national security. READ MORE

JNS Yaakov Lappin: If Israel strikes Iran, Hezbollah’s Nasrallah will obey Iranian orders A highly religious man, Hassan Nasrallah should be expected to follow through on the orders of the Iranian “mothership,” which is not only the source of Hezbollah’s radical Shi’ite Islamist ideology, but also its funding and force build-up.

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Chicago-based Niagara Foundation’s assets frozen because of links with US based cleric Fethullah Gulen, a fierce rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Posted on December 24, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

I24NEWS
Citing terror links, Turkey freezes assets of 770 individuals, US group
Reuters
December 24, 2021

Turkey has frozen the assets of a total of 770 people and a US-based foundation on the grounds of terrorism financing, a ruling published in its official gazette showed on Friday…The assets of more than 400 people were frozen for links to Gulen, the gazette said. This step was taken “on the basis of reasonable grounds” that they had committed the acts covered by the articles titled “the crime of financing of terrorism” and “acts prohibited from providing or collecting funds,” it added. Assets of more than 200 individuals accused of links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Islamic State militant groups were also frozen, according to the decision. READ MORE

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Terror groups lament passing of Desmond Tutu who accused ‘the Jews’ of causing “many of the world’s problems”

Posted on December 24, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

THE LID
What The Media Didn’t Tell You About Bishop Desmond Tutu
by Jeff Dunetz
December 27, 2021

When Bishop Desmond Tutu passed away on Sunday, he was celebrated across the world as a man who led non-violent opposition to South Africa’s white minority rule called apartheid. And he should be honored for that achievement. But the media’s glowing praise of the Bishop left out something important, the hatred he displayed for the Jewish people…He has publicly complained about what he calls “the Jewish monopoly of the Holocaust.”…Before he retired Tutu spewed vile Antisemitism worthy of the famous fraudulent Jew-hating tome “The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion,” which purports to describe a  Jewish plan for global domination. He compared Judaism to Hitler, Stalin, and tyrants, along with bloviating the stereotype that the powerful Jewish lobby runs the U.S. READ MORE

JNS Alan Dershowitz: Bishop Tutu was the most influential anti-Semite of our time
Tutu’s good deeds should not shield him from accountability for his long history of anti-Jewish bigotry, writes famed attorney and Israel advocate Alan M. Dershowitz.

BREITBART Reuters Quotes Palestinian Terrorists Alongside Prominent World Leaders in Reaction Piece to Desmond Tutu Death In a report documenting major reactions to the recent passing of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Reuters international news agency gave a prominent position to a senior Hamas figure as well as an official of the terrorist-designated Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) alongside world leaders and prominent figures

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As violence rises against Jews in Germany, one group has a radically simple scheme to fight back

Posted on December 24, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

SLATE
“Meet a Jew”
by Peter Yeung
December 28, 2021

Apart from the hushed scribbling of pens on paper, silence filled an airy third-floor classroom at Sophie Scholl School on a recent afternoon in Berlin. One by one, two dozen eighth graders folded their sheets and coyly passed them along to the front of the class, where a pair of visitors sitting at a desk gathered them into a pile. A young woman named Liora in a pale-gray sweater, large-rimmed glasses, and a silver Star of David necklace picked up the first shred and read it out loud: “Do people treat you differently as soon as they find out that you are a Jew?” READ MORE

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“Black Fragility” is a thing at UIC-John Marshall Law School

Posted on December 24, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

WASHINGTON POST
The malicious, historically illiterate 1619 Project keeps rolling on
by George Will
December 24, 2021

The New York Times is like God, who, if Genesis reported Creation correctly, beheld His handiwork and decided “it was very good.” The Times is comparably pleased with itself concerning its creation, “The 1619 Project.” This began in August 2019 as a special edition of the paper’s Sunday magazine. Now it has become a book by which the Times continues attempting to “reframe” U.S. history. In the Times, an advertisement for the Times’s book describes it as “a dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism.” That description damages journalism’s reputation for respecting facts, which the 2019 writing that begot this book did not do. The 1619 Project’s tendentiousness reeks of political purpose. READ MORE

LEGAL INSURRECTION The Cruel and Unusual Punishment Of Prof. Jason Kilborn by U. Illinois-Chicago John Marshall Law School UIC has imposed a reeducation and supervision program to publicly humiliate and demean a professor that would make the Maoist Red Guards blush. It is psychologically torturing a professor just because it thinks it can.

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Why praying is the only New Year’s resolution you need

Posted on December 24, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
Living on a Prayer
by Liel Leibovitz
December 29, 2021

Men, went my grandmother’s favorite saying, make plans while God laughs. These days, it sure seems like the Almighty is in the mood for a good side-splitter, more Monty Python than a knock-knock joke. Deadly viruses and deadly storms, political chaos and economic insecurity, and no fewer than 41 Hallmark Christmas movies—the signs of some merry apocalypse are upon us, so ornate and bizarre that they defy rational human explanation. What to do? How to bear the pain? What to resolve as 2021 gives way to 2022, when the very idea of resolutions—predicated, as it is, on a faint belief in human agency, in our own ability to shape reality—seems, in light of all the cosmic chaos, absurd? READ MORE

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Israel’s Health Ministry director may not endorse panel’s recommendation to offer additional booster shots if further data suggests hospitalizations lower from new variant

Posted on December 17, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Israel said to delay rollout of 4th COVID shots amid signs Omicron less severe
by Staff
December 23, 2021

The Health Ministry has reportedly decided that Israel will not begin offering fourth doses of the COVID-19 vaccine starting on Sunday as planned for Israelis over 60 and others at risk. The decision was made at a meeting held by the ministry Thursday evening, Channel 13 news reported. Nachman Ash, the ministry’s director-general, has yet to approve the campaign and has been examining data from Britain indicating the Omicron variant of the coronavirus causes less severe illness than the Delta strain, the report noted. Preliminary data suggest that people with Omicron are between 50 and 70 percent less likely to need hospitalization than those with the Delta strain. READ MORE

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AIPAC: The question isn’t whether the pro-Israel community should support candidates; it’s whether those contributions will make a difference if one of the two parties is being led by leftist foes of the Jewish state

Posted on December 17, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Can AIPAC help lead a new bipartisan surge of support for Israel?
by Jonathan S. Tobin
December 20, 2021

To many casual observers of Washington politics, the news that AIPAC was, for the first time in its history, going to be contributing directly to candidates by forming two political action committees came as a surprise. Many familiar with the name of the pro-Israel lobby and its reputation as a formidable force on Capitol Hill, though not how the organization operated, probably assumed it had been making financial contributions to those running for the House of Representatives and the Senate all along. The PAC at the end of its acronym stood for “public affairs committee,” not “political action committee”—an expression that didn’t come into vogue until long after the group was brought into existence in 1963. READ MORE

JERUSALEM POST What’s behind the AIPAC strategy shift? AIPAC surprised many observers last week with the announcement that it would establish two new PACs that will allow the pro-Israel lobby to directly fund political campaigns. That was a major shift after 70 years in which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee avoided entering the campaign arena in order to be able to balance relationships with both sides of the aisle

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“As part of the new plans being drawn up now, the IDF is also preparing for the possibility to attack without coordinating with the Americans

Posted on December 17, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
What the public doesn’t know about an attack on Iran
by Yoav Limor
December 17, 2021

…When Biden was elected US president, the option of an American attack on Iran was dropped, and then the penny dropped for Israel. At the start of this year, [new IDF Chief of Staff Yoav] Kochavi revived the military option in an aggressive speech at the Institute for National Security Studies. Once the new government was forced, he got the “box” he had been hoping for – special funding of over 5 billion shekels ($1.6 billion) for three years for preparations to attack Iran…The Israeli military currently has plans and capabilities, but the attention and resources allow it to improve them with every month that passes. This, incidentally, is why many senior Israeli officials support a return to the previous bad deal; it might not keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but it will keep it farther away from them…READ MORE

ISRAEL HAYOM Israel Hayom report on potential strike in Iran makes headlines in Arab media The in-depth analysis of a potential Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities by senior Israel Hayom commentator Yoav Limor was cited extensively by Arab media outlets over the weekend, which the majority of them focusing on the timeframe necessary for the IDF to be able to successfully mount such an attack.

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